How things started

My journey with painting started at the end of the last summer somewhere in the middle of August. I came across some Magic: The Gathering card alterations on some internet forum. I thought it might be fun to start doing such things as it might look nice in my decks. Before that I literally hadn’t touched a brush since the elementary school I had absolutely no experience in painting and wasn’t even interested in it. I had some drawing background, though, I used to draw stuff from time to time (mostly during boring lessons in school), but was never really good at it (I mean I was quite good but not pro level).

I bough 2 small brushes, my mom gave some other (she makes a living painting btw) and some really bad quality acrylics leftovers. One afternoon I sat down and started to alter a swamp not expecting my first alteration to be a successful one and... soon I discovered I have a huge talent for rendering. Despite having bad quality acrylics and knowing absolutely nothing about the color theory I was able to mix and match colors almost perfectly. Since that day I fell in love with painting and started to consider becoming an illustrator (firstly aiming at environmental ones for MTG).

During several days i did around 20 MTG card alterations (or so, some are actually not finished till today) but as soon as I discovered advantages of digital painting (and that John Avon uses photoshop) I decided to test it. I bought the cheapest tablet (Wacom Bamboo Pen – couldn’t afford anything better), and installed Gimp (I’m using both till now).

My first paintings were pretty bad. No, actually they were insanely bad. I got a little bit discouraged, but didn’t give up. I started to watch some tutorials on youtube, it gave me a lot of knowledge but unfortunately also a lot of confusion. First steps are always hard, no doubt. Fortunately form me, when I’m into something I learn the skill really fast, and by “really” I mean several times faster than average human being (no exaggeration). It’s not that I have a talent for doing something, it’s just that my mind has a very analytical approach to everything. I always try to understand how things work and once I get a grip of it, I know how to do it. It’s something like being Sylar (from “Heroes”) with a Sharingan (copying eye from Naruto manga series). Painting is all about understanding – understanding of form, light, shadow, value, color, perspective, texture and technique. Once You understand how they work and how to apply them, You know how to paint. Of course no one will ever fully understand them, humans are therefore not capable of mastering painting. There is hope though, we can get pretty close and this became my goal as of late – to get as close as my imperfect mind lets me. Pretty challenging, but it’s something worth to live and struggle for.

Here are some of my alters. I still need to finish few of them. Maybe I'll post some more soon.